San Francisco’s “second” newspaper, the Examiner, launched Examiner.com last year not as the online equivalent for the San Francisco paper, but as a national forum for recruiting citizen journalists to report on the variety of topics a typical newspaper would cover. Participants set up blogs for their topic and city that allows them to develop a unique, granular voice. For example, one of the more popular “columnists” discusses San Francisco radio.

The mission behind Examiner.com is to create massive local blog networks covering as many topics as possible. The Examiner.com management then encourage their bloggers to virally market their blogs themselves, and provides pocket change incentive of $.01 per pageview.

In conclusion, Examiner.com is a great experiment taking an obscure local publishing brand and creating a new online journalistic (albeit not a professional journalist) business model. It melds its mass media name with the social media. I’ve signed on as a Social Media Examiner and will test the concept.

In any case, at least the Examiner is creative enough to try a new business model in light of the horrid newspaper advertising collapse now happening:

(fr. Techcrunch)

Tim O’Reilly’s comprehensive slideshow makes several points about the accelerating speed and syndication of information:

• The real time functionality of the new information distribution systems, elegantly demonstrated by Twitter, is critical to reporting.
• Social Networks facilitate content distribution, and media brands power content credibility

A key function of a publishing brand is the bestowal of status by what you pay attention to

• Advice to major brands like the New York Times: “build the platform and your customers and partners will build features before you do”. Note how the open source Twitter API spawned a riot of applications. The New York Times API, or other media brand APIs can potentially do the same thing – and leverage the content NYT creates and distributes.

Yes, I would like to see Tim’s narrative accompanying the keynote.

Any hope? Sad for the newspaper guilds, but if content can be improved by recruiting citizen journalists / bloggers around the Bay Area (and many are good writers), it may cut expenses enough to provide some sort of business model.

The NY Post just fired their famous gossip columnist Liz Smith, who was making $125,000 annually for three columns per week. What does that mean? Simplistically, Liz’s $800 per column didn’t contribute the extra $800 ad revenue to keep her on… Any entertainment blogger would jump at the chance to replace her.

UPDATE: 2/26/09: Denver’s Rocky Mountain News shuts down tomorrow. They are even selling the website!

Mitch Joel at Twist Image pens a fine article about the newspapers’ inertia to progress on a Web 2.0 model. He points to a New York Times article excerpt to describe the dilemma newspaper publishers face:

“Many current and former Mercury News executives say that a lack of investment by Knight Ridder and MediaNews has given the paper a fairly ordinary website that has been slow to adopt practices that keep readers coming back many times a day, like publishing articles online well before they appear in print, updating them frequently, blogging and posting videos.

‘The answer for newspapers has to lie in building their websites better and better, and promote, promote, promote,’ said Mr. Riggs, who was the Mercury Newspaper publisher under both companies. ‘We haven’t seen that.’

Mr. Butler, the editor, said that with money tight, Web improvements have to wait. ‘Until or unless we see that those things pay for themselves, we make a serious mistake in focusing too much on that,’ he said.”

The recession’s negative impact on advertising and the demise of print due to budget cutting will begin to force publishers to focus on their online presence and connection with their community audience. It’s not only newsprint, local TV and radio are now competing with online print and must also focus on developing their online audience. Radio is particularly vulnerable as their audience discovers that online radio like Last.FM, Pandora and Blip.fm provide a more customized, less commercial listening experience.

So, can embattled media management surrender their 1.0 business model mindset, eliminate print presses and distribution, downsize their news gathering budgets, and rejigger their well known media brand names to become respected online brands? Tall order.

1. Twitter breaks the news

2. Concurrently, TV news – MSNBC, CNN, CNBC – gathers initial pundit reactions that generally mirror the Twitter feeds. The online business news sites also report the news, but don’t seem to have real time access to pundits for commentary

3. Finally, about one hour later after the news breaks, the Anchorage Daily News (and by extension, other newspaper websites) provide a snippet announcement with no editorial, interpretation or commentary

4. Penultimately, newsprint publication 24 hours later with the morning paper. Simply put, stale news makes newsprint irrelevant from a knowledge management standpoint.

5. News weeklies – Time, Newsweek, The Economist, even People – distill the reactions and interpret the breaking news. Some do it better than others.